NextBus

I often found myself waiting for buses at a bus stop, not exactly knowing how long I have to wait for the next bus. Of course I pull out my smartphone, and search for the specific stop I'm standing at, and then scroll through the bus schedules / use google map to know when the bus will be, but that's too much work, and in Canadian cold weather your fingers actually hurt trying to type so many things in. I therefore wanted to make it as easy as possible to know your next bus time.

My hack has two components: a pebble app made using StrapKit, and a server component hosted on Azure. The pebble app grabs your location from your phone, and sends it off to the server. I was working with GTFS data from Montreal, and I parsed the GTFS files and put them on a mongodb database. The server is a node small node app connected to this database that can guess which bus you're waiting for based on your location and time, and it looks up the time of the next bus and sends it back to your pebble. All this happens at the click of one button on the pebble: No more taking your gloves of in the cold to type in names of intersections to find the bus schedule.